NIWOT -- Barbara Abel has had critics say that her method is to take real women and dirty them up for her photographs.

Something quite different is happening, though.

The women in her pictures are antique wax mannequins. True, they are dirty and otherwise overtly worn. But through her portraits of them, Abel brings them back to life and bestows on them a level of dignity they might not have known even in their prime. Their defects can even stir empathy, and some are hauntingly beautiful.

A set of Abel's images is at the center of "Red Light: Tragic Beauties and other objects of desire," an exhibition at Manifest Art Gallery that runs through April 7.

The show also features paintings -- including works by two Colorado masters, Longmont's own Scott Fraser and Quang Ho -- as well as a Bettie Page-style "peep show" booth, for-sale books by Jay Moynahan about prostitution in the Old West, and other objects and images that have to do with desire.

The idea for the show came to Manifest owners Karen Adler and Dia Kline when they learned recently that their building, at 108 Second Ave., was used as a brothel in the late 1970s. Ed McGill, owner of Canvasback Fine Art & Framing, worked across the street from the brothel, which was called Queen of Hearts. He remembers when sheriff's deputies showed up to close the place down.

Advertisement

"Guys were running out the back pulling their pants up," McGill said.

The show, however, is not meant to focus on prostitution, or even sex. It is more about the way people obsess about objects, especially bodies.

"I want people to be confronted with their ideas of objectification," Kline said.

Adler added, "I hope it just makes people think, 'What do I think of it?' "

But the show isn't weighted down with social messages or moralization.

"We're going to set it up in a humorous and fun and intriguing way," Kline said.

Abel first came into contact with vintage wax mannequins in Detroit, where the owner of a collection of mannequins allowed her to photograph them.

"I realized I had something, because they were speaking to me," she said.

Like today's mannequins, the vintage wax versions were produced as a way to lure people into shops and to showcase clothes, but they were made to be much more expressive and lifelike. Even when they were new, starting around the turn of the 20th century, they were not the impossibly shaped plastic people of today's malls. They resembled the very shoppers in the stores, and in fact they were made from live models, though not necessarily professional models. Their hair was made from real hair, their eyes were the lifelike glass sort that were used as human prosthetics, and their teeth were denture quality.

"Everything about them was extremely realistic," Abel said.

Abel's mannequin series has garnered international exposure, such as inclusion in an exhibition at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in England and in Germany's Sleek Magazine, which covers art and fashion.

She said the work is a good fit for the Manifest show. She wrote in an e-mail: "The women who were paid to have their likeness reproduced to be used in department store windows in a way prostituted themselves, as they sold their very essence."

Boulder is pretty good at producing rock bands, and by "rock," we mean the in-your-face, guitar-heavy, leather-clad variety — you know, the good kind. For a prime example, look no farther than BANDITS. Full Story